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Home»John Roach, Madison Magazine columnist & author of While I Have Your Attention

John Roach, Madison Magazine columnist & author of While I Have Your Attention

Submitted by Room on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 5:32pm

Event date:

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - 6:00pm

A Room of One's Own is excited to welcome John Roach to discuss his collection of writing, While I Have Your Attention!

This year marks John Roach’s 25th anniversary as the “back-page” columnist for Madison Magazine. His latest book, While I Have Your Attention, takes on the greatest hits from the last 25 years. With musings on everything from politics and religion to family and cabin life to sports and his many obsessions—music, technology, books, weather, and hometown Madison—Roach entertained and occasionally enraged readers with often witty and always astute observations on life as he sees it. This book has a little something special for everyone who lives in Wisconsin.

John Roach is founder and president of John Roach Projects, a video and film production
company based in Madison, Wisconsin. Before returning home to put down roots and raise his
family, Roach was a producer at CBS and ABC in Chicago for eight years. He developed and
produced “The SportsWriters on TV,” which ran for 13 years and was hailed by Sports
Illustrated as the template for all television sports talk shows. His credits include six Chicago
Emmys, a National Iris Award for Best Television Special and a national CableACE
nomination. Roach and Mary Sweeney co-wrote the screenplay for “The Straight Story,” a movie directed by David Lynch and starring Richard Farnsworth, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The screenplay was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. “Like
Hemingway’s dialogue,” wrote Roger Ebert, “the screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney
finds poetry and truth in the exact choice of the right everyday words.” In 2018, Roach was awarded lifetime membership to the Writers Guild of America.